It’s H-day, baby!! All Hallow’s Day. Halloween. Sam Hain Day. Black and Orange. Spooky Time. Creepy Crawlies. Dress up like a nutball and drink yourself into a blind stupor and wind up disoriented and bleeding on the back porch of some stranger’s house…with no pants (you have no pants, not the stranger, who may or may not have pants). I love Halloween!

Welcome to AWESOME-tober-fest Week 5!!! I revealed yesterday that there will be an article a day starting yesterday, so here’s today’s installment. FYI…I got sick yesterday afternoon. So I want you to know the Herculean effort it took to get this article out. That’s the kind of sacrifice I do for you, my readers.

Today, I want to talk about the the keystone topic I’ve wanted to talk about all month. It’s a series of books I remember vividly from elementary school. I finally acquired copies of the first six books in the series late last year. It was late enough that I didn’t really get a chance to talk about them last Halloween. However, now I’ve had a year to look at them so let’s take a stroll down memory lane at the Crestwood House Monster Series.

I have a very vivid memory of checking these books out from the HW Gwin Elementary school library. The vibrant orange color of the cover and the cool monster subjects made them a popular choice amongst my friends. Each book focused on a monster or creature from a movie or series of movies. The first six books included Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, King Kong, Godzilla and Mad Scientists. Most were published in the late ’70s and early ’80s. As you can see, they are also the inspiration for my blog header this Halloween.

Okay, we’ve hit the home stretch. Halloween is on Friday. In honor of the final three day slide into All Hallows Eve (and the final days of AWESOME-tober-fest) I’ve decided to do an article a day. Yes, you heard me right. AN. ARTICLE. A. DAY. Did I just blow your f%*@ing mind? I’ll just pause a sec for you to recover your faculties…

…so, we good? Okay, like I said, today, tomorrow and Friday are all going to have articles to finish off the home stretch of this year’s AWESOME-tober-fest!!!!! I’m excited, I hope you are too.

Having said that, today is going to be a cheat. Today I’m going the lazy blogger’s route and list a bunch of other blogs! Yay! Seriously, I wanted to acknowledge a bunch of other blogs that are also going through their own version of the AWESOME-tober-fest. It’s a huge network of blogs having one giant Halloween Countdown. Many of these blogs have linked to me and many I myself visit on a daily basis. They are all kick-ass blogs that have some really good content for you to check out. So much Halloween stuff it’ll drive you batty (how about that appropriately Halloween-y adjective? Yes, it was bad ass. Thank you).

Here are the other blogs in this giant blogosphere-wide Halloween Countdown. Check out a few of them if you have the time and get ready for a new article tomorrow.

Welcome to AWESOME-tober-fest Week 4. For those that are just joining us, AWESOME-tober-fest is my countdown to Halloween which includes spooky articles each week covering things like scary books/movies, candy, etc. I’ll discuss these things each week until we finally reach “H-Day” as I like to call it (or Halloween, for the layman). Since we are celebrating in October, and this is the Cavalcade of Awesome, the name of this countdown is AWESOME-tober-fest. If you missed any of the first three weeks, here’s a handy dandy list:

I was going through an old chest of mine in the garage a week or so ago and found my old stash of Mad Magazines. Along with all my Mad mags, there was also a huge stash of Cracked magazines. Talk about hitting the mother lode. I loved reading Mad and Cracked magazine when I was a kid. I would wait each month to buy the copy and read it endlessly until the new issues came out. I even bought the Super Specials and Collector’s Editions which only reprinted material I already owned, but I didn’t care. I loved the spoofs, parodies and humor of my Mad and Cracked magazines. I saved every issue I bought of these magazines and stored them carefully in this chest when I was about 13 and it was left there until I opened it a few weeks ago. I had found my own personal Arc of the Covenant.

Welcome to Week 3 of AWESOME-tober-fest!!! Hope you’ve enjoyed the first two weeks so far. I started off week 1 talking about creepy Halloween sodas. Then, on week 2, I discussed a few of my favorite scary movies. What’s on deck for this week? Well, as teased to you at the end of last week’s article, Steph and I took the plunge and went to our first Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights this past weekend. Universal Studios theme parks hold this event annually and this year marked the 18th year they have done it. I’ve been wanting to go since we moved down to Jacksonville but we never did and thanks to some cheap, discounted tickets at work, we were able to do it this year. In case you didn’t know, ever since around 1990, during the Halloween season, Universal Studios closes its doors (along with Islands of Adventure) around 5:30 – 6pm and clears out all the people. Universal then sets up the scare zones and haunted houses and opens the doors again for people who bought Halloween Horror Nights tickets (yes, it’s a separate ticket). There are as many as 8 haunted houses that are setup in various parts of the park as well as what are called scare zones. In these scare zones are park employees who dress up in scary costumes and follow around patrons trying to creep them out or scare them. Like the haunted houses, each scare zone has a different theme, usually based around what haunted house is near it. Halloween Horror Nights usually has an overall theme each year, too. Last year, with Freddy, Jason and Leatherface it was called the Carnival of Carnage. The year before that they did a “best of” theme with all the best haunted houses and scare zones from the years prior. This year, the overall theme was Bloody Mary; which included famous myths, legends and fairy tales. Bloody Mary is the spririt that would appear to you in a mirror if you said her name 3 times. She’s in the picture below on the right.

It’s a pretty cool theme if you ask me and I was very excited to see what Universal did with it. So, after work on Friday, the wife and I took off for Orlando and our scary Halloween adventure. Continue reading →

Welcome back to Week 2 of AWESOME-tober-fest. Last year I did an article telling you guys about some of my favorite scary books. It surprisingly became fairly popular and has been seeing steady traffic. So, this Halloween (AKA AWESOME-tober-fest) I thought I’d list out some of my favorite scary movies.

Now, this won’t be a “scariest movies of all time list”, that’s too easy. This list is gonna be typically Pax-centric. It’s all about what I like, my friends. That’s the only way I can work, ALL ABOUT ME. So this list will consist of movies that I really enjoy watching but not ones that I would consider the greatest Horror/Monster movies of all time. You can Google “Greatest Horror Movies” and literally get thousands of results if that’s what you are looking for, but this list will be a bit more nuanced. And by “nuanced”, I mean “stuff Pax likes”. If that is also your definition of nuanced, then you’ve come to the right blog.

I’ve put this list in chronological order. Let us begin.

Dial ‘M’ For Murder (1954) – A Hitchcock classic. This one really ratchets up the suspense (well, it is Hitchcock). Also, Grace Kelly is beautiful and wonderful as always. I prefer her in Rear Window, however, as she has more to do because, make no mistake, this is Ray Milland’s picture. Oh my lord, this guy is the balls. Cold, calculating, smart. He never once loses his calm demeanor despite being grilled by a Sherlock Holmes wanna-be detective. Ray Milland plays a husband who recruits a man to kill his wife (Grace Kelly). He has everything planned down to the last detail but something goes wrong and he must try to frame another man for the attempt. The script for this was originally a theatrical play, and you can tell by how the cameras were setup and everything was filmed. Also, it was originally released in 3-D, which not many people know, and I got to see it that way on the big screen at the Alabama Theater during Halloween 2003, I believe. This is a great movie.

Psycho (1960) – Hitchcock, again, at his best. Anthony Perkins pulls a fantastic performance here as Norman Bates. It’s easy to see why he was typecast after this movie. His performance here is so menacing, how could he be seen as anyone else? FYI…stay away from the sequels. They are awful. Psycho II is just embarrassingly bad. Wishful thinkers tend to say that four is not bad, but they are kidding themselves. This is the only movie with ‘Psycho’ in the title worth watching (and I’m including American Psycho in that statement too).

Happy October, everyone. How crazy is it that it’s October 2008 already? I can’t even believe it. It’s like I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy with my wife back in January and seeing Meredith and McDreamy break up, have sex, get back together, stop having sex, then completely ignore each other, AGAIN, put me to sleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for 6 months. I got some catching up to do.

Anyway, now that I’m back, get ready for some hardcore AWESOME to come flying at your eyes like Moe Howard and his index finger. Stand back and bask in the warm glow of your monitor and let the rays of unfiltered BAD-ASS flow from it into you. No need to fear, AWESOME-tober-fest is here. That’s right, October has begun, and with it brings the first of three themed months on the Cavalcade of Awesome. I love the final three months of the year. I theme the blog for each month. October is Halloween. November is Thanksgiving, or just fall in general. December is glorious, glorious Christmas. As you can see, I’ve done some redecorating for Halloween. The decorations are up, what do you think?

The new blog banner up top is an homage to a specific Halloween item I will be reviewing later this month. It’s something I’ve loved from my youth and just recently acquired thanks to eBay. From my October blogs of LAST year I’ve been wanting to find and review the items I’m currently speaking of but was unable to find any. I finally have them and will unleash them on you unsuspecting readers later on. I’d do it now, but I haven’t actually written the review. Besides, it’ll work better closer to Halloween.

Anywho, today I’m looking at Halloween sodas. Several have been released over the years, so I thought I’d take a look at a few. Some are old, some are new, let’s see if any made me spew. LOL…that was so awesome that I got that to rhyme. You may as well stop reading now because the article doesn’t get any better than that. Seriously, that was the pinnacle of this article. You have been warned, I can’t top that.